My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  And how could I have explained the evolution of this history, clear though it was from the very first days of rapacious tradesmen and bigoted priests? My college mates had nothing in their experience wherewith to understand. All that they knew about China was that they had heard a missionary beg for money in a church so that he could teach the Chinese or feed them or buy Bibles for them and they thought of the great and beautiful country as a land of beggars and savages instead of the most ancient existing civilization in the world, with a culture older than any in Europe. So I did not explain. I read my mother’s letters alone and pondered the changes which she described so vividly and then I put them aside to face when I returned.

  Now, however, the struggle of Sun Yat-sen was a matter of daily study in the newspaper and daily talk with my Chinese friends. Could he organize a republic or not? If not, what would then happen? Would we have a throne again and a new Emperor and if so, who would he be?

  Meanwhile as usual in the midst of political confusion the life of the Chinese people went on in its accustomed ways, with no ferment and no uproar. The greatest change that I could see outwardly was that the men and boys had their queues cut off, and their hair cut in Western fashion, since the queue had been a sign of subjection to the Manchu dynasty and that dynasty was ended. Even so, many a Chinese peasant clung to his queue and did not want to cut it off. He did not know why he had it, but his father and forefathers for generations had worn the queue and therefore it must be good. But peasants were overcome by the strong forces of revolution and young men, some of them my own students, stationed themselves at the city gates through which the farmers had to pass to carry their vegetable baskets and bundles of fuel to the markets, and when one wore a queue they sat him down on a stool and lectured him and cut off his appendage, even though he wept while they did so. In a matter of some years all the queues seemed to be gone, although when I was living in North China after my marriage a few years later, I still occasionally saw dusty-haired farmers from the back country with modest little queues curled under their felt caps, and now and then I found an old woman who did not know that the Empress Dowager was dead although she had been in her jewelled tomb for twenty years. I considered this ignorance remarkable at the time but have discovered since that it was not. The New York Times recently published the results of an American history test given to thousands of college freshmen throughout the United States. Among other amazing discoveries were these: that thirty percent of them did not know Woodrow Wilson was President during the First World War; that only six percent were able to name the first thirteen colonies—many even listed such states as Texas and Oregon; and a third of them did not know who was President during the Civil War. People everywhere do not concern themselves much beyond the common round of everyday, and this is the chief problem for a democratic government, whose success depends upon an informed and responsible citizenry.

  There were many conservative and well-educated old Chinese, however, who heartily disapproved of Sun Yat-sen and the revolution and all the doings of the young people, and who wished the Throne back again. Some of them were friends of my parents, and while I heard the arguments of the young during the day in my classes, I had the other side from these older Chinese. I was hard put to it sometimes to answer the questions which the students asked in class. One of their favorites was to demand of me in halting English, which nevertheless improved daily, “Why does not your country give freedom to the Filipinos?”

  I did not know why, but later the rising ambitions of Japan helped me and I could then reply, “If Americans leave the Philippines, the Japanese will come in. Would you rather have the Japanese?”

  They had to acknowledge that they would not. At that time the United States was the most popular of the Western nations. In spite of resentment against our demand that we share the benefits of extraterritoriality and trade agreements, the Chinese did not fear us as an imperial power, for that was before the days of Communism, but they did very much fear the new strong Japan.

  Yet even that Japan had, I knew, its roots in the old evil of empire and colonization. I had Japanese friends who insisted, to me that the only way to insure Japan’s continuing freedom was to make her too strong for any Western power to colonize.

  “You must remember, my dear young lady,” Mr. Yamamoto said to me one day. He was a rich merchant who had a home in our town as well as in Japan and he was responsible, as were others like him, for filling the Chinese shops gradually over the years with a plethora of cheap but remarkably good merchandise and driving out to the same extent the more expensive products of Britain and the United States. “You must remember,” he repeated, wagging a long pale forefinger at me, “every Asian country has either been seized by a Western power, as India has been, or it has been despoiled and weakened by excessive demands and the Unequal Treaties and frightful indemnities as China has been. Only Japan remains free, and we are in great danger. We could never tolerate colonization. It is necessary, therefore, for us to make ourselves an empire as Britain has done, and China is the logical place for us to begin. We will develop China, we will not despoil her—it would not be to our interest.”

  What could I say? It seems to me now, looking back, that I spent those first years of my return in almost complete silence. I listened and could not reply. Sometimes even my father, impatient because of the lack of central government and the confusion of rising war lords and revolutionists in China, would exclaim that “it might be a good thing if Japan came in and cleaned China up.”

  To this I could and did make retort that I was sure it would not be a good thing. The Japanese and the Chinese are as nearly opposite in their national characteristics as it is possible for human beings to be. There is more difference between them than there is between any two peoples in the white race. Their geography has shaped their history, and their history could not be less alike. The Chinese are actually much more like the Americans, also a continental people, than they are like the Japanese who are an island people, and I knew that the Japanese, much as I liked and admired them and do still, would be tyrants if they were able to rule in China. They could never understand the Chinese, and not understanding, they would, out of fear and insecurity, try to rule by force and that, of course, the Chinese could not tolerate.

  Many years later, on a bright Sunday afternoon in December in Pennsylvania I heard that Japanese bombs had fallen upon Pearl Harbor. I remembered instantly the words of Mr. Yamamoto, spoken so long ago, and again I saw the path of history clear from the very first Portuguese vessel that sailed the seas to maraud on the coasts of Asia to the Japanese ships of the air flying to destroy as much as they could of the strongest Western power in the world. Step by step, cause always preceding result, history marches on.

  Young as I was in those early years, and filled with conflicting and youthful interests and impulses, I tried very hard to understand what was taking place in my worlds. I was lonely in many ways. My years in college had separated me from the Chinese girls with whom I had once been such close friends. They were all married and busy with household affairs, and they felt strange with me, perhaps because I had been away to college. They asked me a thousand questions for, unlike the Americans, the Chinese are full of curiosity about other peoples and will stop at nothing in the way of intimate detail, and I answered as best I could. Invariably our sessions together ended with the one important question they put to me anxiously, a very personal question—“When are you going to be married?”

  “I don’t know,” I always replied.

  The next question was also invariable and concerned. “Are your parents doing nothing about finding a husband for you?”

  Without exception their parents had found husbands for them in the approved old Chinese fashion. It was still too soon for the later wave of impetuous rebellion of youth against traditional marriages, and a Chinese girl or young man would have been astonished and embarrassed to be told that she or he must find a mate. Marriage was a family affair, and
the parents pondered with much care upon the nature of their child and the sort of person that should be found to complete his or her life. It was also essential that this person fit into the family group, for where the generations lived together in the old Chinese custom, it could only bring unhappiness if the new person did not fit into the circle, both in birth and breeding. The results of these arranged marriages were usually good. Most of them were happy, an even higher percentage, I think, than in the individualized and romantic marriages of the West. This is only to be expected, for marriage, after all, is basically a practical matter and romantic aspects pass into solid love and companionship. Usually love did develop after marriage, sometimes romantic and passionate love, but it was not an essential. Such marriages had perhaps the greater chance for survival because the expectations of romantic love were not as high as they are in the West.

  At any rate, my Chinese friends were happily married and busy with babies, and although I was young enough they were troubled about my solitary state. As far as my own race went, I had no possible friends except my English Agnes, and she, alas, I had outgrown. The nearest American woman to me in age was thirty-five years old, a missionary’s wife and the mother of three children. It was another generation. Nor was I allowed to accept the attentions of any of the few young white men in the British Concession in our city. Among them were even two or three Americans with the Standard Oil Company or one of the tobacco companies. I did accept their invitations at first without thinking, until one of the older missionary women in the narrow circle lectured me one day severely. “You cannot continue in both ways of life,” she said solemnly. “If you go with the business people you must leave the missionary circle.”

  “I am not a missionary,” I insisted. “I am a teacher.”

  “You are a teacher in a missionary school,” she reminded me, “and your parents are missionaries.”

  “My parents don’t mind,” I persisted.

  “The rest of us do,” she retorted.

  For the sake of my parents I refused all invitations from then on and scheduled my days severely between work and home. I began to study Chinese books and as my mother’s health grew a little better I travelled about the country within walking and riding distance. My Chinese friends, however, were still concerned, and I know they talked with my parents about arranging a marriage for me. This resulted in a curious argument between my father, who had become far more Chinese in his mentality and feelings than he was American, and my mother, who remained American to the core. My father, it seemed, would have been pleased to have me marry a young Chinese gentleman of his own choice but my mother was wholeheartedly against it. I listened and reflected and did not take sides, for I saw no danger from the handsome and brilliant Chinese whom my father had in mind, since his family would not have tolerated his marriage to an American, even though she were my father’s daughter. I decided, instead, since my mother’s health was better, that I would like to go to some other part of China, and carve out my career alone.

  I knew in my heart as I had always known, that someday I would be a writer, but I was not yet ready. I still felt empty. I know now, of course, that emptiness is the normal state of youth. No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fisherman goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

  I did not want to travel to other parts of China to find material for writing but I did want to find more life. I was caught in too small a circle and I wanted to break away, as all young people do and should, from the childhood environment. I wanted to move out from being the child of my parents and make my own place among strangers. Yet it did not occur to me to go back to America, partly because I did not want to leave my mother at such a distance, for her malady was only better and not cured and it would never, I feared, be cured. Therefore I must be within distance of possible return. Beyond this, however, I was genuinely part of my Chinese world again, a new world changing from day to day, and China was destined, as even then I could see, to be a pivotal country in the future. She had always been a source country in culture, and India alone, although completely different, could be her rival. Now I wanted only to be free to live in China as I liked, in some place where I could escape the confines of dogmatic religion. Casting about I thought of a woman who had stirred my imagination ever since I had first heard of her. She lived alone in a distant and ancient city of the province of Yunnan, itself, I had always heard, a supremely beautiful part of a beautiful country. I sat down one day at the little Chinese desk in my room and wrote to Cornelia Morgan and asked her if she would let me come and work with her. Somehow or other, weeks later, her friendly reply fell into my mother’s hands and then I saw a new aspect of my mother. She broke down and wept and said that if I went away she did not want to live and why was I dissatisfied here, where everyone loved me so much? And what would the Chinese say if I deserted my parents when they believed in filial piety?

  I said, “But you left your home when your father did not want you to do it. Grandfather even forbade your marriage.”

  Her dark eyes were tragic. “I know it,” she said, “and I did wrong. I wish I had obeyed him.”

  This was a terrifying revelation, and I was struck speechless. I neither promised to stay nor insisted upon going. I was simply silent, and a few days later she fell seriously ill again and the doctor said that someone must take her up the mountains of Lu, to Kuling. There was no one to do that except me, for my father would not have thought of leaving his work. I asked for leave of absence from my school and my mother and I boarded one of the clean little English river steamers and set sail for Kiukiang, where we would take sedan chairs for the climb up the mountains. My fate, at least for the time being, was settled.

  The importance of Kuling in the lives of the white people in the central provinces of China must now be explained. There were other summer resorts, but none of them, we felt, compared with Kuling. It was much more than a summer resort, it was a lifesaving station, especially in the early years of my childhood before it was known how some of the worst of the tropical diseases, against which white people seemed to have no immunity whatever, were carried. I can remember the devastation of malaria, for example, from which the Chinese suffered and grew thin and yellow but from which they recovered far more often than the white people did. At the first rumor that mosquitoes were the carriers my father had promptly nailed cheesecloth over all the windows of our house, and people thought he had gone insane. As soon as he could buy wire screening from Montgomery Ward ours was the first house to have it. Cholera, the autumn menace, we knew was somehow carried by flies, and certainly conveyed by mouth, and I can remember how terrified my mother was lest we eat any raw fruit or anything indeed which had come from the Chinese markets until it was cooked, and how when an epidemic was raging, which was every autumn during my childhood, we never used even eating utensils until they had first been placed in briskly boiling water, and this at the table where my mother could supervise the process, and dishes and silverware were wiped with boiled dish towels kept by my mother. Yet none of us was easy from the middle of August until the first of October, and we children learned, on pain of death, not to put anything in our mouths, not even fingers, until boiling water or soap and water and disinfectant had been applied.

  The death of children had really compelled white parents to find some place where families could go for the worst months of our tropically hot summers, and my father had been one of the little group of white men who explored the famous Lu mountains, where old temples had existed for centuries in a climate so salubrious that it was said the priests lived forever. I can still remember the day when I was a small child that my father came home from the expedition and reporte
d that high in those mountains, six thousand feet above sea level, he had found the air as cold as early winter, though the season was midsummer. There was a rough stone road up the mountainside, carved no one knew how long ago by priests and pilgrims, and bamboo mountain chairs were available and the bearers were the neighboring farmers.

  “The air up there is like the Alleghenies,” my father said, “and the brooks run clear.”